While interviewing 11 executives involved in the Java ecosystem, we asked who they saw as the most important players. To no one’s surprise, Oracle was the most frequently mentioned. However, some of the other companies may surprise you.

Oracle, Java Advisory Committee, Google, Spark, Mozilla, Cloudera and Netflix. When we have to do something new, we look to see if Netflix has done it yet.

Oracle since they own the JDK, lead development and standards. IBM is committed to all of those things as well. Open source companies like: Pivotal/SpringSource, Apache, TypeSafe (Scala focused, thought leaders).

Oracle is the main driver. A good healthy community and contributors like IBM, Red Hat, Azul and even SAP. IBM is on the governing board for openJDK.

Oracle drives the features. Typesafe has an interesting and influential role as functional programming grows in importance. This is unchartered territory for Java and Typesafe can be very influential to its success.

IBM, Eclipse, Red Hat, and Google. Android has changed a lot. It has pulled Java back into the mobile game.The Javascript frameworks Backbone and Angular are changing the development environment being used for the backend.

Oracle goes without saying. The language companies are pushing the envelope . JRuby, Groovy, Gradle, Scala - to improve the language and the ecosystem to improve productivity, scalability and tool chain to make the enterprise production-ready.

Open source developers and the community are adding more interest and innovation around Java.

JVM vendors, Oracle, and IBM. Cloud business - IBM and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. If something is happening the big players seem to be driving it. Smaller players (e.g. JBoss) are in niches. Innovation is happening at the smaller level in specific niches like app servers and middleware. Oracle produces the “official stuff,” the “new, big things.”

The Java community - individuals make it better driving evolution in each sector. Also, Oracle, IBM, and Intel.